


Let me fly in the face of the sun

by stardustinthesky



Category: Battlestar Galactica (2003)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-06
Updated: 2015-09-06
Packaged: 2018-04-19 08:55:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 678
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4740428
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stardustinthesky/pseuds/stardustinthesky
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He remains on course as she flies over, under, beside, all around him. He wants to join in her dance and laugh and shout, but he doesn’t. Lee never does.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Let me fly in the face of the sun

There are many things that she enjoys, many things that haven’t disappeared with the destruction of the Twelve Colonies:

She takes her time to appreciate the stogie dangling between her lips and marring her fingertips; she sits at a table playing triad with other pilots and clinks glasses filled to the brim with ambrosia, cards getting stained; she still gets drunk enough to laugh all the way back to her rack.

But they say she hasn’t lost much in this war; she doesn’t go to the wall and hang pictures of family and friends that were down there when the nuclear holocaust happened. 

(what she holds dear, she keeps close, stuck inside her locker.)

 

 

*

 

Her life’s always been there, they say.

But they don’t know of the father who taught her how to play piano and love it so much she couldn’t even touch the frakking thing after he left (that, and her mother’s tendency of shutting doors on her daughter’s fingers.)

They don’t really know of the man she loved except for that one godsdamn picture ( _Zak, Gods Zak_ ), buried deep in sacred ground, because she didn’t want to fail him the way he failed his flying tests; his smile on a picture and his ring around her thumb the only proof that she was someone else’s once.

No, they don’t know Kara Thrace at all.

 

*

 

They think she goes up there to shoot Cylons out of the frakking sky; they think she enjoys the catapult more than sex, leaving her breathless and high and screaming in delight all over the comm; they think she’s a show-off hotshot pilot and nothing else.

She shoots Cylons because that’s what she’s been trained to do. She laughs when the catapult goes off; she’s still alive.

(it’s not showing off; it’s coming back to the Galactica in one piece.)

 

* 

 

( _what do you hear, Starbuck?_

_Nothing but the rain._ )

Nothing but silence; on the rare times she’s on CAP and her wingman is Lee ( _why did you have to be Zak’s brother?_ ) and he is nothing but a breathing murmur through the comm, the stars muted in their light and the fleet going to scheduled sleep, closing in for the night—

_Nothing else but us._

—she grips the joystick of her Viper harder, closes her eyes and twirls.

 

*

 

She’s not all about the smoking and the drinking and the frakking, Lee knows that. It just got that way after Zak died; the drinking and the brawling and the times she had to be put in hack, and her path to destruction, only to be pulled by his dad and shipped to Galactica where his old man could keep an eye on the girl who’d almost become his daughter-in-law.

Kara Thrace is all about bravado and contradictions; she’s happy and then she’s angry and it switches back and forth, and back and forth because she can’t find middle ground anymore. Too damaged, too hurt, too angry.

The more she puts on the Starbuck show, the more she loses herself,  _Kara_.

But in moments like this one, she finds herself again.

He’s always thought he was good, but Kara’s  _better_ ; the Viper is an extension,  _a part_ , of herself and she lets herself soar high, dancing around him. It takes his breath away every time they are lucky enough to be able to go on CAP together, and every time he falls in love even more.

(and hates himself more.  _Sorry, baby brother._ )

He remains on course as she flies over, under, beside,  _all around him_. He wants to join in her dance and laugh and shout,  _look we’re alive_  but he doesn’t. He never does.

That’s not how it works.

He remains the silent and stoic wingman while she becomes free; while she’s being the Kara he used to know when Zak was around, while she’s finding that part of her again, the one she thought had died with Zak.

(he prays to the Gods that, one day, she’ll get out of the cockpit and be  _Kara_  again, not just  _Starbuck_.)

 

—end


End file.
